His Bite Stole My Tomorrow

Locked Floors

The tower looked exactly the same from the sidewalk, glass catching the gray afternoon light, gold lettering over the entrance spelling out a name that meant considerably more to her now than it had two days ago. Marlowe crossed the lobby with her badge from the audit still clipped to her coat, the same credential that had gotten her through security without a second glance the first time.

This time a different guard stood behind the desk, older, unfamiliar, his eyes flicking over her badge with a flatness that told her nothing before he'd even opened his mouth.

"I need to speak with Mr. Shade," she said. "Floor forty-eight. He'll know why."

"Mr. Shade isn't receiving visitors today."

"I was here last night. I have an active audit clearance."

"That clearance was revoked this morning." He said it without apology, reciting it flatly, like something handed to him rather than something he actually understood. "Building policy. Nothing personal."

"Revoked by whom."

"Management." He didn't look up from his screen again, which told her more than the words did. "You're welcome to submit a written request through the firm's usual channel. I can't let you past this desk without one."

She thought about pushing, about raising her voice the loud, impatient register people used in this lobby when they wanted a badge reactivated on the spot, and decided against it fast. Something about the guard's stillness reminded her too much of Micah's, not supernatural exactly, but careful, rehearsed, a man saying exactly the words he'd been told to say and no more.

She stepped back from the desk and pulled out her phone instead, scrolling to the number Micah had given her the night before in case she needed to reach him. It rang twice and disconnected, not to voicemail, just gone, as if the number on the other end no longer existed at all.

The disconnection tone in her ear landed harder than it should have, a small mechanical failure that felt like it meant something much larger.

She tried again. Same result. She stood there a moment longer than she needed to, phone still pressed to her ear even after the tone had already run its course, some part of her hoping the silence itself might resolve into an answer if she simply waited long enough. It didn't. It rarely did, in her experience. Silence tended to stay exactly what it was until someone forced it open.

A number that had worked twelve hours ago now behaved like it had never been assigned to anyone at all, and she stood in the middle of a marble lobby with a folder full of dead policyholders and a compliance officer who'd vanished out a diner's back door, watching her own last remaining thread to any of it go silent in her hand.

"Ma'am." The guard's voice again, flatter this time. "I need you to step away from the desk if you're not submitting paperwork."

She almost asked him outright whether he knew what floor forty-eight actually held, whether anyone on this staff understood what kind of tenant they were protecting, and stopped herself before the question could leave her mouth. If Aldergate had reached this far into the building overnight, reached far enough to swap out a guard and disconnect a phone number in under twelve hours, then saying too much in this lobby was its own kind of danger. She'd spent six weeks treating this audit like numbers on a page. It had stopped being that the moment the elevator doors closed on her two nights ago, and she was only now catching up to how far behind that realization she actually was.

"Has anyone else asked about him today. Anyone at all." She kept her voice even, the same tone she'd have used asking about a routine filing delay, though nothing about this felt routine anymore.

Something crossed his face, brief, there and gone, a flicker of hesitation a well-trained man doesn't quite manage to hide. "I'm not authorized to discuss building visitors."

"That's not a no."

He didn't answer, which was its own answer, and she felt the same cold settle into her chest that she'd felt reading Marsh's last text before he disappeared out a kitchen door and never came back through it.

She'd already tried calling Marsh's office extension twice on the walk over, and both times the automated system had informed her the number was no longer in service, a message that arrived far too quickly for an employee who'd simply taken an unannounced day off. She'd thought about calling his home, then remembered she didn't have it, that six weeks of working under him had never once required anything beyond an office line, and now that felt like a professional distance she deeply regretted keeping.

She left the lobby and crossed the street to get a wider view of the building, tilting her head back to count floors out of habit, though from the sidewalk there was no telling which windows belonged to the penthouse and which belonged to something else entirely. Somewhere up there Micah might be fine, guarded and cautious as always, choosing silence the same way he'd chosen it for a hundred years before her. Or somewhere up there he might already be exactly what Marsh had become to her that morning, a person who mattered and then abruptly didn't answer anymore, no explanation offered, no body found, just an absence with his name attached to it.

She didn't like how much that second possibility unsettled her. She liked even less that it unsettled her more than the first version of fear she'd felt about him, back in that elevator, when she'd still believed the danger only ran in one direction. Two days ago she would have called this concern purely professional, a source drying up before she'd finished her interview. Standing on a public sidewalk with her chest tight and her hands unsteady, she couldn't quite make herself believe that version of events anymore, and she resented him a little for that, resented herself more for letting it happen this fast.

Her phone buzzed against her palm before she'd finished the thought.

It was a new contact entirely, a name she hadn't saved, appearing on her screen as though it had always been there, neither the unknown number from before nor Marsh.

Elva Rourke.

We should talk about him before you decide he's worth protecting.